Light power

What you see at right is a picture of a very nearly perfect sunny Southern California day (today!), as seen by an instrument called a pyrometer. This instrument measures the incident solar power in my backyard every minute. This is just fancy talk for how much heating power the shining sun is delivering. It's calibrated in watts per square meter.

You can tell a lot from this simple graph. Most basically, you can see that the sun rose this morning at around 6 am, and it's going to set around 6 pm. You can see that it looks at least roughly like a chopped-off sine wave, and in fact it's very close to that, as a sine wave is exactly how it would look if the only effect on the sun's power was its elevation in the sky. But there are a few other things affecting the sun's power.

For instance, when the sun is low in the sky, its rays are traveling through more air to get to my yard. This additional air (and the junk floating around in it) attenuate the rays even more than is accounted for by the elevation. Then there's the scattering effect, most easily seen just before sunrise where the graph shows a little bit of slowly gathering power. If I had a pyrometer on the moon, there would be no such slow gathering of light — the light would either be there or not as the sun rose. But I live where there's an atmosphere (thank goodness!), so the scattering of light in the pre-dawn sky registers on this instrument as that gentle curve at sunrise that accelerates into the near sine wave when the rising sun strikes the instrument.

And finally there's the effects of the slight cloudiness that developed this afternoon just before 4 pm. You can easily see the sudden drop on power as a cloud obscures the sun, and the "choppiness" afterwards as clouds pass overhead.

More than you wanted to know ?

So different

...and it got me to thinking about my own first military homecoming. A very different one. I was an enlisted sailor in the U.S. Navy, serving on the USS Long Beach, a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser. I'd gone out to sea on a cruise, and had been gone for many months. When I returned to our home port of Long Beach, California, and left the ship and base for the first time, I was in uniform because all my civilian clothes were in storage. At that time (this was the early '70s; the Vietnam War was still going on) sailors were not allowed to take their civilian clothes on the ship.

I had a long walk from the main gate to the "locker club" where my stuff was stored. At first, the walk was very pleasant — my first view in many months of good old America. But that pleasantness was soon destroyed. First by a pretty girl walking toward me, her face all twisted with emotion as she cursed me on her way by. "Baby killer" she called me. I was shocked, very shocked, though of course I had seen on TV and read plenty about anti-war protests. Then other things happened — people yelling hateful things from passing cars, signs in shop windows saying "Sailors and Dogs Not Welcome", a schoolbus full of high school kids telling me how despicable I was. But the worst was yet to come.

I got my clothes from the locker club (they were friendly in there, at least), and walked in civilian clothes toward the long-term car storage place where I had stashed my 1965 Ford Country Squire station wagon. I was still recognizable as a sailor because of my haircut, and I still got some trash from passers-by — though by this time I was getting pretty angry about it, and was no longer quite so shocked. By the time I arrived at the place that was storing my car, all I wanted to do was escape, as quickly as possible. I walked into the storage place's office, and presented the clerk — a long-haired, scroungy looking young man — with the paperwork for my car. He threw it back at me and said that I could not have my car, as he was not about to do anything to help "an enemy of all mankind" like me, and he told me in a quite vulgar and direct way what I could do with my paperwork. I've never forgotten that phrase: an enemy of all mankind. What a label to put on a returning sailor. Not exactly an uplifting moment.

At that time I was a very naive young man, quite literally straight off the farm, and I had no idea what I could do. I couldn't even imagine what recourse I might have in the face of this young man's simple refusal to serve me. I just stood there, gaping, for who knows how long...probably just a few seconds. And then a grizzled, grimy, greasy man of approximately World War II vintage came into the office; the owner, I found out later. He grabbed my paperwork, got my car, and I was on my way. After a few hours driving through the beautiful California countryside, down to Lake Elsinore where I camped over the weekend, I got my psychic balance back. But as you can probably imagine, the whole experience remains pretty fresh in my memory...

As I watch our soldiers being greeted in a much different way on their homecomings from Afghanistan and Iraq, I have a very strong emotional reaction. I find myself choking back tears at the simplest little such story. The ad from the Superbowl, with the returning soldiers being cheered by the passengers in the airline terminal had me teary-eyed — and unreasonably happy and proud — for days. And the simple story from TigerHawk, in its own way, did the same. Silly perhaps, but for this Vietnam-era veteran seeing the wonderful welcome these troops are getting is somehow putting to bed the last of the bad memories and feelings I've had ever since my Navy days.

Thanks, TigerHawk, for welcoming the troops as you did. Read TigerHawk's whole story here, but here's the good part:

Traffic cops and a slew of passersby lined the sidewalk. A Coast Guard helicopter buzzed in from Corpus Christi Bay then banked.

We joined the crowd on the corner of Water Street and Peoples. We may have waited three minutes, at the most. Here came the convoy — a police escort followed by two buses filled with young Marines. We cheered, saluted and clapped as the company rolled by. (I feel certain the company belongs to the 1/23rd Marines. The 1/23rd is a Marine reserve battalion just back from Iraq — and I have friends in Central Texas whose sons serve in that unit. If I’ve got the Corpus Christi unit misidentified, post a comment or drop me an email and I’ll correct it.)

Most of us old codgers wore short-sleeves and slacks, so it’s a fair bet the Marine reservists didn’t know their former Corps commander and his senior staff were cheering with the home crowd. (Probable wisecrack if someone informed a lance corporal: “Hey, sarge—are those the guys responsible for all the dumb orders you didn’t like?”)

Actually, the Marines were smiling and waving—the one memorable face I saw framed in the bus window as it shot past was that of a delighted but obviously tired young man.

Jet lag or Iraq lag? Or lag from a week at the 29 Palms Marine base? Doesn’t really matter now – welcome home.

A hint of desert summer

The graph at right was produced from data collected by an automated weather instrumentation system we have at our home (a WeatherHawk system). For months, during our blessedly normal wet season, we've had very temperate weather — lovely temperatures and relative humidities that most people would at least recognize. But yesterday one of our notorious "Santa Ana" weather systems moved in, and the hot, dry, desert winds came in. At around 10 pm on Wednesday evening the humidity was 90%; just four hours later, at 2 am on Thursday morning, it hit 10%. The low yesterday was 4% and as I write these words on Friday morning it is 10% and falling as the sun rises in our perfectly clear eastern skies. The big surprise for me is that the relative humidity can be so low despite the fact that our ground (and the chaparral) is still soaking wet.

This is a foretaste of our summer!

The 100 best

Hat tip to TigerHawk for the pointer. Here's a sample:

The Swiss Spaghetti Harvest

On April 1, 1957 the British news show, Panorama, broadcast a segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland. The success of the crop was attributed to an unusually mild winter. The audience heard Richard Dimbleby, the show's highly respected anchor, discussing the details of the spaghetti crop as they watched a rural Swiss family pulling pasta off spaghetti trees and placing it into baskets.

"The spaghetti harvest here in Switzerland is not, of course, carried out on anything like the tremendous scale of the Italian industry," Dimbleby informed the audience. "Many of you, I'm sure," he continued, "will have seen pictures of the vast spaghetti plantations in the Po valley. For the Swiss, however, it tends to be more of a family affair."

The narration then continued in a tone of absolute seriousness:

"Another reason why this may be a bumper year lies in the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil, the tiny creature whose depradations have caused much concern in the past."

Dimbleby anticipated some questions viewers might have. For instance, why, if spaghetti grows on trees, does it always come in uniform lengths? The answer was that "this is the result of many years of patient endeavor by past breeders who succeeded in producing the perfect spaghetti."

And apparently the life of a spaghetti farmer was not free of worries: "The last two weeks of March are an anxious time for the spaghetti farmer. There's always the chance of a late frost which, while not entirely ruining the crop, generally impairs the flavor and makes it difficult for him to obtain top prices in world markets."

But finally, Dimbleby assured the audience that, "For those who love this dish, there's nothing like real, home-grown spaghetti."

Of course, the broadcast was just an April Fool's Day joke. But soon after the broadcast ended, the BBC began to receive hundreds of calls from puzzled viewers. Did spaghetti really grow on trees, they wanted to know. Others were eager to learn how they could grow their own spaghetti tree. To this the BBC reportedly replied that they should "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best."

To be fair to the viewers, spaghetti was not a widely eaten food in Britain during the 1950s and was considered by many to be very exotic. Its origin must have been a real mystery to most people. Even Sir Ian Jacob, the BBC's director general, later admitted that he had to run to a reference book to check on where spaghetti came from after watching the show.

The prestige of the Panorama show itself, and the general trust that was still placed in the medium of television, also lent the claim credibility. The idea for the segment was dreamed up by one of the Panorama cameramen, Charles de Jaeger. He later said that the idea occurred to him when he remembered one of his grade-school teachers chiding him for being "so stupid he would believe spaghetti grew on trees."

You can read the other 99 here (they're just as good!).

Quote for the day

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

   Anatole France